Life & Wisdom Quote by John Ashbery

Ashbery turns possession into heartbreak. “The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be” makes a deliberately perverse little drama: the poem isn’t an object you own; it’s a voice with desire. By giving the poem agency, Ashbery smuggles in a critique of how we’re trained to treat art as property, something “understood,” collected, summarized, mastered. The sadness isn’t just in the poem’s content but in the mismatch between what readers want (a clean handoff of meaning) and what the poem can actually give (a shifting experience that refuses to settle into one person’s grip).

The line also winks at intimacy. “Yours” suggests a relationship more than a transaction: the wish that a poem could belong to you the way a memory, a lover, or a private joke might. Ashbery’s speaker recognizes the fantasy and punctures it in the same breath. A poem can court you, haunt you, feel tailored to your life, but the moment you try to pin it down as “mine,” it slips back into language’s public life. Other readers arrive. Time changes you. Even you reread it differently, which means you can’t quite be its final owner either.

In Ashbery’s larger context - postwar American poetry suspicious of grand certainties, and his own career of making opacity feel conversational - the sentence is a soft manifesto. It defends difficulty not as elitism but as honesty: meaning is relational, temporary, and shared. The poem “wants” you, but it won’t flatter you with permanence. That’s the ache, and the lure.